Part 1
WALLED TOWNS
BY
RALPH ADAMS CRAM
LITT.D., LL.D.
[Illustration]
BOSTON MARSHALL JONES COMPANY M D CCCC XX
COPYRIGHT, 1919 BY MARSHALL JONES COMPANY
_All rights reserved_
First Printing, September, 1919 Second Printing, February, 1920
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.
WALLED TOWNS
PROLOGUE
The stone-flagged path on the top of the high walls winds along within the battlemented parapet, broken here and there by round turrets, steeple-crowned barriers of big timbers and, at wider intervals, great towers, round or square or many-sided, where bright banners blow in the unsullied air. From one side you may look down on and into the dim city jostling the ramparts with crowding walls and dizzy roofs, from the other the granite scarp drops sheer to the green fields and vari-coloured gardens and shadowy orchards full forty feet below.
Within, the city opens up in kaleidoscopic vistas as you walk slowly around the walls: here are the steep roofs of tall houses with delicate dormers, fantastic chimney stacks, turret cupolas with swinging weather vanes; here the closed gardens of rich burgesses, full of arbours, flowers, pleached alleys of roses, _espaliers_ of pear and nectarine; here a convent or guild chapel, newly worked of yellow stone and all embroidered with the garniture of niches, balustrades, pinnacles. Here, under one of the city gates, opens a main street, narrow and winding but walled with high-gabled houses, each story jutting beyond the lower, carved from pavement to ridge like an Indian jewel casket, and all bedecked with flaming colour and burnished gold-leaf. Below is the stream and eddy of human life; craftsmen in the red and blue and yellow of their guild liveries, slow-pacing merchants and burghers in furred gowns of cramoisy and Flemish wool and gold-woven Eastern silks; scholars in tippet and gown, youths in slashed doublets and gay hose, grey friars and black and brown, with a tonsured monk or two, and perhaps a purple prelate, attended, and made way for with deep reverence. Threading the narrow road rides a great lady on a gaily caparisoned palfrey, with an officious squire in attendance, or perhaps a knight in silver armour, crested wonderfully, his emblazoned shield hanging at his saddle-bow,--living colour mixing and changing between leaning walls of still colour and red gold.
Here a stream or canal cuts the houses in halves, a quay with gay booths and markets of vari-coloured vegetables along one side, walls of pink brick or silvery stone on the other, jutting oriels hanging over the stream, and high, curved bridges, each with its painted shrine, crossing here and there, with gaudy boats shoving along underneath. Here a square opens out, ringed with carved houses,--a huge guild hall on one side, with its dizzy watch-tower where hang the great alarum bells; long rows of Gothic arches, tall mullioned windows, and tiers and ranges of niched statues all gold and gules and azure, painted perhaps by Messer Jan Van Eyck or Messer Hans Memling. In the centre is a spurting fountain with its gilt figures and chiselled parapet, and all around are market booths with bright awnings where you may buy strange things from far lands, chaffering with dark men from Syria and Saracen Spain and Poland and Venice and Muscovy.
And everywhere, tall in the midst of tall towers and spires, vast, silvery, light as air yet solemn and dominating, the great shape of the Cathedral, buttressed, pinnacled, beautiful with rose windows and innumerable figures of saints and angels and prophets.
There is no smoke and no noxious gas; the wind that sweeps over the roofs and around the delicate spires is as clean and clear as it is in the mountains; the painted banners flap and strain, and the trees in the gardens rustle beneath. There is no sound except human sound; the stir and murmur of passing feet, the pleasant clamour of voices, the muffled chanting of cloistered nuns in some veiled chapel, the shrill cry of street venders and children, and the multitudinous bells sounding for worship in monastery or church and, at dawn and noon and evening, the answering clangour of each to all for the Angelus.
And from the farther side of the walls a wide country of green and gold and the far, thin blue of level horizon or distant mountains. There are no slums and no suburbs and no mills and no railway yards; the green fields and the yellow grain, the orchards and gardens and thickets of trees sweep up to the very walls, slashed by winding white roads. Alongside the river, limpid and unstained, are mills with slow wheels dripping quietly, there where the great bridge with its seven Gothic arches and its guarding towers curves in a long arc from shore to shore. Far away is perhaps a grey monastery with its tall towers, and on the hill a greyer castle looming out of the woods. Along the road blue-clad peasants come and go with swaying flocks of sheep and fowl and cattle. Here are dusty pilgrims with staff and wallet and broad hats, pursy merchants on heavy horses with harness of red velvet and gold embroidery; a squadron of mounted soldiers with lances and banners, and perhaps my Lord Bishop on his white mule, surrounded by his retainers, and on progress to his see city from some episcopal visitation; perhaps even a plumed and visored knight riding on quest or to join a new Crusade to the Holy Land.
Colour everywhere, in the fresh country, in the carven houses, in gilded shrines and flapping banners, in the clothes of the people like a covey of vari-coloured tropical birds. No din of noise, no pall of smoke, but fresh air blowing within the city and without, even through the narrow streets, none too clean at best, but cleaner far than they were to be thereafter and for many long centuries to come.
Such was any walled town in the fifteenth century, let us say in France or England or Italy, in Flanders or Spain or the Rhineland. Carcassonne, Rothenbourg, San Gimignano, Oxford, ghosts of the past, arouse hauntings of memory today, but they tell us little, for the colour is gone, and the stillness and the clean air. Ghosts they are and not living things; and life, colour, clarity, these were the outward marks of the Walled Towns of the Middle Ages.
* * * * *
“It was not a pretty station where McCann found himself, and he glared ill-naturedly around with restless, aggressive eyes. The brick walls, the cheaply grained doors bearing their tarnished legends, “Gents,” “Ladies,” “Refreshment Saloon,” the rough raftered roof over the tracks,--everything was black and grimy with years of smoke, belching even now from the big locomotive, and gathering like an ill-conditioned thunder-cloud over the mob of scurrying, pushing men and women, a mob that swelled and scattered constantly in fretful confusion. A hustling business-man with a fat, pink face and long sandy whiskers, his silk hat cocked on one side in grotesque assumption of jauntiness, tripped over the clay-covered pick of a surly labourer, red of face and sweaty, blue of overalls and mud-coloured of shirt, and as he stumbled over the annoying implement scowled coarsely, and swore, with his cigar between his teeth.
“Ragged and grimy children, hardly old enough to walk, sprawled and scrambled on the dirty platform, and as McCann hurried by, a five-year-old cursed shrilly a still more youthful little tough, who answered in kind. Vulgar theatre-bills in rank reds and yellows flaunted on the cindery walls; discarded newspapers, banana skins, cigar butts, and saliva were ground together vilely under foot by the scuffling mob. Dirt, meanness, ugliness everywhere--in the unhappy people no less than in their surroundings....
“The prospect was not much better outside than in. The air was thick with fine white dust, and dazzling with fierce sunlight. On one side was a wall of brick tenements, with liquor saloons, cheap groceries, and a fish-market below, all adding their mite to the virulence of the dead, stifling air. Above, men in dirty shirt-sleeves lolled out of the grimy windows, where long festoons of half-washed clothes drooped sordidly. On the other side, gangs of workmen were hurriedly repairing the ravages of a fire that evidently had swept clear a large space in its well-meant but ineffectual attempts at purgation. Gaunt black chimneys wound with writhing gas-pipes, tottering fragments of wall blistered white on one side, piles of crumbling bricks where men worked sullenly loading blue carts, mingled with new work, where the walls, girdled with yellow scaffolding, were rising higher, uglier than before; the plain factory walls with their rows of square windows less hideous by far than those buildings where some ignorant contractor was trying by the aid of galvanized iron to produce an effect of tawdry, lying magnificence. Dump-carts, market-waggons, shabby hacks, crawled or scurried along in the hot dust. A huge dray loaded with iron bars jolted over the granite pavement with a clanging, clattering din that was maddening. In fact, none of the adjuncts of a thriving, progressive town were absent, so far as one could see....
“The carriage threaded its way through the roaring crowd of vehicles, passing the business part of the city, and entering a tract given over to factories, hideous blocks of barren brick and shabby clapboards, through the open windows of which came the brain-killing whir of heavy machinery, and hot puffs of oily air. Here and there would be small areas between the buildings where foul streams of waste from some factory of cheap calico would mingle dirtily with pools of green, stagnant water, the edges barred with stripes of horrible pinks and purples where the water had dried under the fierce sun. All around lay piles of refuse,--iron hoops, broken bottles, barrels, cans, old leather stewing and fuming in the dead heat, and everywhere escape-pipes vomiting steam in spurts. Over it all was the roar of industrial civilization. McCann cast a pitying look at the pale, dispirited figures passing languidly to and fro in the midst of the din and the foul air, and set his teeth closely.
“Presently they entered that part of the city where live the poor, they who work in the mills, when they are not on strike, or the mills are not shut down,--as barren of trees or grass as the centre of the city, the baked grey earth trodden hard between the crowded tenements painted lifeless greys, as dead in colour as the clay about them. Children and goats crawled starvedly around or huddled in the hot shadow of the sides of the houses. This passed, and then came the circle of “suburban residences,” as crowded almost as the tottering tenements, but with green grass around them. Frightful spectacles these,--“Queen Anne” and “Colonial” vagaries painted lurid colours, and frantic in their cheap elaboration. Between two affected little cottages painted orange and green and with round towers on their corners, stood a new six-story apartment-house with vulgar front of brown stone, “Romanesque” in style, but with long flat sides of cheap brick. McCann caught the name on the big white board that announced “Suites to let.” “Hotel Plantagenet,” and grinned savagely.
“Then, at last, even this region of speculative horrors came to an end, giving place to a wide country road that grew more and more beautiful as they left the town far behind. McCann’s eyebrows were knotted in a scowl. The ghastly nonsense, like a horrible practical joke, that the city had been to him, excited, as it always did, all the antagonism within his rebellious nature. Slowly and grimly he said to himself, yet half aloud, in a tone of deliberation, as though he were cursing solemnly the town he had left: ‘I hope from my soul that I may live to see the day when that damned city will be a desolate wilderness; when those chimneys shall rise smokeless; when those streets shall be stony valleys between grisly ridges of fallen brick; when Nature itself shall shrink from repairing the evil that man has wrought; when the wild birds shall sweep widely around that desolation that they may not pass above; when only rats and small snakes shall crawl though the ruin of that “thriving commercial and manufacturing metropolis”; when the very name it bore in the days of its dirty glory shall have become a synonym for horror and despair!’ Having thus relieved himself he laughed softly, and felt better.”[A]
[A] “The Decadent,” 1893.
I
What is the way out? The question that was universal during the war, “How has this thing come?” gives place to the other that is no less poignant and no less universal, “What is the way out?” There must be a way; this coil of uttermost confusion must be solvable, must be solved--_if only we knew the way!_ There can be no going back, of that we are sure, and the industry of the serious-minded men, busy with set faces and a brave optimism, in their cheerful efforts to restore the old course of events after an accidental interlude, fills us with a kind of shame that people who have lived through the war should have learned so little both of the war and from it. Four years have ended the work of four centuries and--there is no going back. “Finis” has been written at the end of a long episode and there is no way by which we can knit together again the strands that are severed forever. There is even less desire than ability. It does not show very well in the red light of war, that act in the great world-drama that opened with the dissolution of Mediævalism and the coming of the Renaissance; that developed through the Reformation, the revolutions of the eighteenth century and the sequent industrialism, to its climax and catastrophe in war. There is little in it we would have back if we could, but the unstable equilibrium in which we hang for the moment, poised between reactionism and universal anarchy, cannot last; already the balance is inclining towards chaos, and in the six months that will intervene between the writing of this and its publication it may very well be that the decision of inertia will be made and the plunge effected that will bring us down into that unintelligent repetition of history now so clearly indicated in Russia, Austria, Germany. We can neither return nor remain but--would we go on, at least along the lines that are at present indicated? Are we tempted by the savage and stone-age ravings and ravenings of Bolshevism? Have we any inclination towards that super-imperialism of the pacifist-internationalist-Israelitish “League of Free Nations” that comes in such questionable shape? Does State Socialism with all its materialistic mechanisms appeal to us? Other alleviation is not offered and in these we can see no encouragement.
It is the eternal dilemma of the Two Alternatives, which is nevertheless no more than a vicious sophism: “Either you will take this or you must have that,” the starling-cry of partizan politics by which “democracies” have lived. In all human affairs there are never only two alternatives, there is always a third and sometimes more; but this unrecognized alternative never commands that popular leadership which “carries the election,” and it does not appeal to a public that prefers the raw obviousness of the extremes. Yet it is the third alternative that is always the right one, except when the God-made leaders, the time having come for a new upward rush of the vital force in society, put themselves in the vanguard of the new advance and lift the world with them, as it were by main force. Reactionism or Bolshevism: “Under which king, Bezonian? Speak or die!” We are told that the old world of before-the-war must be restored in its integrity or we must fall a victim to the insane anarchy of a proletariat in revolt, and for many of us there is little to choose between the two. We have seen how fragile, artificial and insecure is civilization, how instantly and hopelessly it can crumble into a sort of putrid dissolution the moment its conventions are challenged and the ultimate principles of democracy are put in practice, and we do not like it. We have seen Russia, Germany, Hungary, and sporadic but disquieting examples in every State, no matter how conservative it may be or how successful in a first stamping out of the flame. On the other hand, we saw the triumph of “Modern Civilization” in the twenty-five years preceding the Great War, and as we realize now what it was, through the revelations it has made of itself during the last five years, we like it quite as little as the other. We see it now as an impossible farrago of false values, of loud-mouthed sentimentality and crude, cold-blooded practices; of gross, all-pervading injustice sicklied o’er with the pale cast of smug humanitarianism; a democracy of form that was without ideal or reality in practice; imperialism, materialism and the quantitative standard. Is there no alternative other than this, restored in its unvarying ugliness of fact and of manifestation, or the imitative era of a new Dark Ages which will be brought to pass by the new hordes of Huns and Vandals that again, after fifteen centuries, menace a greater Imperialism than Rome with an identical fate? There _is_ a third alternative; there may be more, but the one which makes its argument for acceptance on the basis of history and experience is here put forward for consideration.
In three books already published in this series which has been issued from time to time during the Great War--“The Nemesis of Mediocrity,” “The Great Thousand Years” and “The Sins of the Fathers”--I have tried to determine certain of the causes which led to the tragical _débâcle_ of modern civilization at the very moment of its highest supremacy; and now while mediocrity pitifully struggles to meet and solve an avalanche of problems it cannot cope withal, and anarchy, like Alaric and Attila and Genseric at the head of their united hosts, beat against the dissolving barriers of a forlorn and impotent and discredited culture, I would try to find some hints of the saving alternative, and if possible discover some way out of the deadly _impasse_ in which the world finds itself.
From “The Nemesis of Mediocrity” it should be sufficiently clear that I do not believe that any mechanical devices whatever will serve the purpose: neither the buoyant plan to “make the world safe for democracy,” nor any extension and amplification of “democratic” methods onward to woman’s suffrage or direct legislation or proletarian absolutism through Russian soviets, nor socialistic panaceas varying from a mild collectivism to Marxism and the _Internationale_, nor a league of nations and an imposing but impotent “Covenant,” nor even a world-wide “League to Enforce Peace.” We have heard something too much of late of peace, and not enough of justice; peace is not an end in itself, it is rather a by-product of justice. Through justice the world can attain peace, but through peace there is no guaranty that justice may be achieved. There must always be the material enginery through the operation of which the ideal is put into practice, but in the ideal lies the determining force, whether for good or evil, and by just so far as this is right in its nature will the mechanism operate for good ends. The best agent in the world, even the Catholic Church or the American Republic, may be employed towards evil and vicious ends whenever the energizing force is of a nature that operates towards darkness and away from the light.
I have tried in “The Sins of the Fathers,” to prove that the marks of degeneracy and constructive evil in the modernism that went to its ruin during the Great War, and is now accomplishing its destiny in the even more tragical epoch of after-the-war, are its imperialism, its materialism and its quantitative standard--that is to say, its acceptance of the gross aggregate in place of the unit of human scale, its standard of values which rejected the passion for perfection in favour of the numerical equivalent, and its denial of spirit as a reality rather than a mere mode of material action--while the only salvation for society is to be found in the restoration, in all things, of small human units, the testing of all things by value not bulk, and the acceptance once more of the philosophy of sacramentalism.
It would be possible, I suppose, to develop a detailed scheme for the reconstruction of the world along certain definite lines that would be in accordance with these principles, but the question would at once arise, How could it be made to work? Frankly, the question is unanswerable except by a categorical negative. The nineteenth-century superstition that life proceeds after an inevitable system of progressive evolution, so defiant of history, so responsible in great degree for the many delusions that made the war not only possible but inevitable, finds few now to do it honour. The soul is not forever engaged in the graceful industry of building for itself ever more stately mansions; it is quite as frequently employed in defiling and destroying those already built, and in substituting the hovel for the palace. It is not even, except at infrequent intervals, desirous of improving its condition. As a whole, man is not an animal that is eager for enlightenment that it may follow after the right. At certain crescent periods in the long process of history, when great prophets and leaders are raised up, it is forced, even against its will, to follow after the leaders when once the prophets have been conscientiously stoned, and great and wonderful things result--Athens, Rome, Byzantium, Venice, Sicily, the cities of the Middle Ages, Flanders, Elizabethan England--but the untoward exertion is its own executioner, and always society sinks back into some form of barbarism from whence all is to be begun again.
Nor is education--free, universal, secular and “efficient”--an universal panacea for this persistent disease of backsliding; it is not even a palliative or a prophylactic. The most intensive educational period ever known had issue in the most preposterous war in history, initiated by the most highly and generally educated of all peoples, by them given a new content of disgrace and savagery, and issuing at last into Bolshevism and an obscene anarchy that would be ridiculous but for the omnipresent horror. And the same is true both of industrialism and democracy, for both have belied the promises of their instigators and have brought in, not peace and plenty and liberty, but universal warfare, outrageous poverty, and the tyranny of the ignorant and the unfit.
Before the revelations of war, while the curious superstitions of the nineteenth century were still in vogue, it was widely held that evolution, education and democracy were irresistible, and that progress from then on must be continuous and by arithmetical if not geometrical progression. When the war came and the revelations began to unfold themselves, it was held with equal comprehensiveness that even if our civilization had been an illusion, our trinity of mechanistic saviours but a bundle of broken reeds, the war itself would prove a great regenerative agency, and that out of its fiery purgation would issue forth a new spirit that would redeem the world. It is a fair question to ask whether those that once saw this bow of promise in the red skies have found the gold at the rainbow’s end or are now even sure the radiance itself has not faded into nothingness.